I recognize that Adam Carolla’s entire schtick is to be awful and pretend he’s achieved some sort of profound insight, but I think his latest ugly comments about women in the writers’ room are worth highlighting, if only as an illustration of what men can get away with essentially without consequence in Hollywood. He told the New York Post:

They make you hire a certain number of chicks, and they’re always the least funny on the writing staff. The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”…I don’t care. When you’re picking a basketball team, you’ll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you’re playing the odds. When it comes to comedy, of course there’s Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re playing the odds? No. If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they’d be off TV. They’re not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we’d know who she was? Honestly.

I cannot even imagine what would happen if a prominent female comedy writer was this openly dismissive of network brass, much less a request by network brass that you behave like every other employer in America is expected to behave, or add a little perspective to your team. Actually, I have a pretty good idea: she’d be branded a bitch, impossible in a way that Dan Harmon, recently defenestrated from Community, can’t even begin to contemplate. You can see that in Jessica Borsiczky being careful to say that even though she’s known women who were retaliated against for taking maternity leave, things are much better in television today. You can see it in Amy Sherman-Palladino trying as hard as she can not to be seen criticizing another female showrunner even as a (female) interviewer goads her as hard as possible into a catfight narrative.

And yet Adam Carolla, a comic so pathetic he thinks it’s clever to suggest nerds are undatable, to say that men are somehow neutered by the rise of feminism, that it’s uproarious to suggest the acronym LGBT be replaced with YUCK, is somehow, by virtue of these clear demonstrations of wit and the fact that he’s a dude with a frattish fanbase, free to behave like this. It’s not like the pretense that Hollywood is a meritocracy is anything but torn to shreds, but really, Carolla is one of the most humiliating illustrations of its utter, miserable failure.

Adidas is notorious for pushing the envelope in sports fashion, most recently for outfitting men’s college basketball team in hideous neon uniforms for the NCAA Tournament.

The company’s newest product, however, reaches a whole new level of provocation, and it’s hard to imagine a shoe company coming up with a worse idea than this:

That’s the new Adidas JS Roundhouse Mid, a basketball shoe that was set to debut in August and was aimed at those who have “a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles.” The shoe’s rather unsubtle use of shackles has, understandably, drawn criticism for symbolizing slavery and prison chains.

Adidas said the shoe represented “nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery.” Scott, the company noted, is known for “quirky, lighthearted” designs.

Adidas pulled the shoe out of production late last night, and I’m of the belief that it wouldn’t intentionally approve a design that symbolized slavery. But that is the problem: apparently, no one in any stage of the process stopped long enough to think that a product set to be marketed largely to African-Americans that included shackles and chains might have negative racial overtones in a country where slavery existed for more than two centuries.

It would be tough to mistake Mickey Mouse or panda bears—features of past Scott designs—as anything but “quirky” or “lighthearted.” To many Americans, though, this design’s dependence on shackles and chains isn’t quirky, lighthearted, outrageous or unique—it’s offensive. Amazingly, it took a massive public outcry for Adidas to realize that.

I’m not sure how long this recording of a Dave Chapelle stand-up set is going to stay up. But it’s amazing, particularly the bit starting around the 11:00 where he talks about telling a casual homophobe he was gay to shut the guy up and having his expectations confounded during New York Pride. And it contains the line “I am a homosexual from the future, and we need your help, Dave Chapelle”:

The bridge is yours.

-Tracking Ray Bradbury’s predictions.

-Five summer sci-fi recommendations from NPR.

-Angelina Jolie looks amazing as Maleficent.

-What it takes to make Merida’s curly hair in Brave.

-This might be better than the Bronn-Tyrion buddy comedy:

As someone who writes about popular culture, I have to shake my head and laugh rather than vigorously bashing it into my desk. Such is the case with Thomas Delatte’s “100 Hottest Olympians” post for Bleacher Report, a piece so sexist, so insulting, so foolishly written, and that reflects so poorly on the writer that it’s astonishing that someone thought it passed muster. The concept is simple: help heterosexual dudes spot attractive women at the Olympic games (God forbid women admire the bodies of any competitors), and remind them that the important thing isn’t that these women have trained their entire lives to prove that they’re preeminent in their fields, but they’re available to be ogled by viewers at home. Along the way, Delatte reveals that he doesn’t know much about a lot of Olympic sports, but that he’s a gold medal contender in the field of condescending grossness. What follows are the fifteen (out of one hundred profiles) most astonishingly awful things Delatte has to say about female Olympians from around the world, in no particular order:

1. “Maja Wloszczowska won a silver in the women’s cross-country back in 2008 and is back for gold. As long as she wears those sexy bike tights, I don’t mind her returning every four years.”: Because she’s there for you, not for her, or for her country or anything like that.

2. “It is an Olympic year and that means we get to meet all kinds of new hotties like Stacey.”: Wait, you mean this isn’t an international effort to promote peace and unity? It’s a Maxim fan convention? Thanks for clarifying it!

3. “If the soccer thing doesn’t work out—and we already know it will, but if it doesn’t—she can just become a WAG. She is dating Jrue Holiday.”: Here that, fellow working women? Marriage is the exact equivalent of obtaining your own professional goals!

4. “Rowing is a sport that gets no love. That might be because, unless you have grown up around the sport, it is boring. You are watching a team of women row a boat faster than the other women. Uh, yawn. But there is a six-foot, 157-pound reason to enjoy it this year. Her name is Gevvie Stone.”: Apparently mastering the nuances of, say, football or basketball, leaves no room for understanding the strategy of any other sport except OMG HOT GIRLS.

5. “If she doesn’t win anything in London, at least she can go home as part of the hottest Czech Republic duo in beach volleyball.”: Someone needs a lesson in false equivalencIes.
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Listening to Aaron Sorkin talk about The Newsroom, his show about cable news, and Amy Sherman-Palladino respond to Shonda Rhimes’ disappointment that she didn’t make sure Bunheads, her ABC Family ballet show, had a character of color, there are some remarkable similarities. First, Sorkin in New York Magazine:

And this all has to come with the caveat that I don’t really know what I’m talking about…No, I mean it. All of my training and experience and education has been in playwriting. I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I’m going to make. It is a layman’s amateur argument. Oftentimes, I write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes. I’m used to it. I grew up surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, and I like the sound of intelligence. I can imitate that sound, but it’s not organic. It’s not intelligence. It’s my phonetic ability to imitate the sound of intelligence.

And Sherman-Palladino, as Vulture transcribes her on Media Mayhem:

Sherman-Palladino never addressed the race issue point blank, but she did defend the casting choices in the context of a rushed schedule. “I had to find four girls who could dance on point, and also act, and they give you, like, a week and a half to do it. That’s how pilots go.” Then she added: “I don’t do message shows. I don’t give a shit who you learn your life from.” And she doesn’t give a “flying fuck” about eating disorders.

The subjects are different, but the dodges of responsibility are ultimately kind of the same. Sorkin insists he’s just an artist, he doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say, even though the animating subject for a huge chunk of his career has been critiques of the media. He can’t have it both ways. Sherman-Palladino’s insistence that only “message” shows can be held responsible for the ideas they send out into the universe is a weird, critique-evading stance: you can mean no harm and do it anyway. And it’s pretty weird that you’d make stories about young girls and their hopes and dreams if you actually “don’t give a shit who you learn your life from.” People tell stories because they want to influence people, or because they have an argument or critique they want to make. You can’t claim credit for doing that when it’s convenient to you and deny responsibility when it gets uncomfortable.

It’s kind of hairy in the comments over on my open letter to the folks who are psyched to see Lara Croft get raped, but I wanted to pull out this long note from suratd on whether there is a core misosynist nerd culture (separate from the happy, enthusiastic, not-always-perfectly-progressive-but-often-engaged-with-ideas community many of us spend a lot of very happy time in) that is unreachable by reason:

It’s not that these people need explanation regarding “the hard, immutable truths of adulthood.” It’s the rejection of those truths as hard and immutable, the rejection of the notion that “this fantasy of yours, it’s a fantasy,” that form the very foundation of classic male nerd-dom. They know, on some level, that the real world works as you’ve outlined…and their response to this is to reject that greater societal construct in favor of a new one that adheres to rules of their crafting. Such lies the eternal resonance of the Doctor Who quote “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”

And so you can’t actually reach or convince these people by pointing out “there’s a world out there you’re cutting yourself off from”; that’s the purpose of their intent. The hostility on their part comes from the notion that “you can’t put all of us [women] in whatever it is you perceive to be our places. There are too many of us” is indeed starting to come true. If that comes to pass…now they have to reject their own substituted reality and replace that with yet another brand-new one.

People like who I’m talking about will never “die out.” They will never “grow out of it.” Nobody makes fun of their perceived “loser” status in the eyes of the rest of the world more than themselves. For this group, the response isn’t going to be “to assimilate” in response to “why not check out what men and women are building together? If you like what you see, then welcome.” Their response, on some level, will be “we don’t like what we see.” So instead of fighting over a barren rock…they’ll just withdraw further into the worlds of “not reality.” And make a new rock. Or a new planet. Or a new forum. Or adopt a new Internet protocol, one that’s intentionally left overly complicated so regular people can’t easily adopt it.

And that’s something that numbers alone can’t overcome. The most dedicated, the most obsessed, they’re the ones who set the pace for a counter-culture. They’re the ones who’ll put the time in. People who play and are otherwise actively involved in “the culture” for 16 hours a day will ultimately retain power over tens of thousands who rally to something for a day or a week or a month before something else comes along. And when you don’t have people in your lives you don’t want to hurt, when you don’t care about doing damage to yourself because what’s currently done is irreversible, you tend to have more disposable income than other people within your same economic bracket. So they not only have the time…they have the money. How many people can spend at least $60 a week on the new game that comes out? How many people buy the expensive merchandise?

The open letter format is solid for addressing to the rational what the problem is. But how do you contend with the extremely small yet vocal group that sees it and says “I know all that already, and I’m still ready to pay money to see that stuff happen in games, and if it’s removed from the games due to public outcry I’ll find a way to add it back in”?

That’s the million-dollar question. I don’t have the answer. I just know the current answer people have isn’t cutting it. And this is with them already in a state where most must be silent in public and interact via relative anonymity in communities of their own creation.

I want to believe that no one’s unreachable. And if folks are giving up on mainstream society, I always want to believe that we can win them back, that if folks feel hopelessly ill-equipped to succeed given the conditions they face, that we can work together to give each other the tools to get more of what we want. And I do really believe that feminism is not a zero-sum game in which men face only loss and no benefit. But I am at something of a loss when faced with this kind of attitude, if folks think it’s an accurate description of a real phenomenon.